Chapter 6

Ten teaching tales to brighten the gloom: Hosepipes, the Enigma code and the execution of Anne Boleyn

In the late 1990s, during one of the periodic episodes of concern over teacher shortages, a series of adverts appeared on TV on the theme of ‘Everyone remembers a good teacher’. Various celebrities, actors, sportspeople and others appeared, to extol the virtues of a Mr Smith or Miss Brown who had done something to influence their lives. All very charming. I have to say that one of the delights of a lifetime in teaching is having conversations with former pupils when I’m out and about, even though they usually have to remind me who they are. Invariably they will launch into a memory of a school play, a trip out, a barmy thing that I did in a lesson or encouraged pupils to do and even, from time to time, thank me for putting them on to an author, a film-maker or, best of all, giving them the confidence to try different things in their lives. The characters on the TV adverts did much the same thing, remembering instances that had been prompted by teachers, that inspired or influenced them. Yet I have to observe that in all of my experience or, apparently, that of those celebrities enthused by good teachers, I have never heard anyone say something like, ‘That Mrs Smith – she was some teacher! She really knew how to deliver the National Curriculum’. That’s because prescription has nothing to do with good teaching. It is in the spaces between what needs to be done and what actually happens in classrooms that real learning often takes place. This book exists to give prominence to those tens of thousands of teachers who maintain a strong sense of what great education can do and what it could look like on a daily basis. So here are ten tales of varying length to reaffirm to ourselves that this is what teachers do best and that this is how children learn, albeit that many of the narrators of these tales still talk of keeping a metaphorical eye on the classroom door, lest they be caught-out in their digressions! In relaying these narratives, I often leave the teachers to speak for themselves.

Tale 1: Helen and the Enigma code breaker

Early in her first interview, Helen, a teacher of maths in a secondary school, muses about ‘an ideal world ... where there’s no more exams and you just teach and they’re interested and engrossed’. It is worth making the point that Helen herself achieves good grades and results from her classes, but she remains resentful of the constant pressure and, in her view, the unnecessary reminders of the need to produce such outcomes. ‘But it’s the evidence, isn’t it, you know?’ she tells me. ‘Kids enjoy my lessons. I know they do. But it’s not that that people look at. It’s your results, and that’s what you’ve got – you’ve got to deliver’. She tells me about an episode with her Year 8 class. Somehow, she has strayed – or, to be frank, allowed herself to be led – to talking about code-breaking and because she has a keen interest in the breaking of the Enigma code during the Second World War, begins to talk about it to the class.

I hope that every teacher who reads this can recall glad memories of what happens next. The class is fascinated. They begin to ask genuine questions. They want to know about something that is new and exciting. And these are golden moments for both the class and the teacher: the class is happy not to be doing any ‘real work’ and the teacher is being happily – and knowingly – diverted from routine business. But a seam has been opened and the sensible teacher knows she must mine it, whether or not it matches today’s Learning Objective staring down at her from the interactive whiteboard. Before anyone knows it, they have reached the end of the lesson and a good time has been had by all.

Regrettably for Helen, she feels a sting in the tail. She says she knows that she has genuinely excited interest and, if need be, could argue that there is ample mathematical content in what she has talked about. Nonetheless, she ends this explanation by reflecting in a rather poignant but sardonic way that the digression ‘took up a lesson ... I wasted a lesson, that’s how it was at the end of the day. Oh my God, I’ve got to catch up. I’ve got to finish this chapter.’ Although I strive to be as neutral as possible in my capacity as researcher and interviewer, I admit to breaking my own rules on this occasion by letting Helen know that no one in their right mind could have regarded her actions in such a light. Even though she broke away for a while, Helen shows herself not to be GERM free. The same applies to Robert.

Tale 2: Robert, the conkers and why your mum is always right

Robert is a primary teacher in east London. During an interview conducted in autumn, he tells how a child found a conker on the way to school and took it into a class that contains ‘children who don’t know what a conker is’. His immediate dilemma is to decide whether or not to talk to the class about conkers or to press on with the numeracy lesson scheduled for that morning, which is part of the school’s prescribed procedure. He ponders for a few moments before deciding, against his instinctive judgement, to postpone the conkers to later in the day. Unsurprisingly, by the time he gets round to doing so the children have predictably lost ‘some of their enthusiasm’. The moment has been lost and Robert has learnt a lesson of his own – but not before he has also received a reprimand of his own as well.

As a coda to the story he relates how he speaks about this to his mother, a retired Deputy Head, who gently tells him off and advises him in future, to ‘change everything around ... and focus on what had been brought in’. When asked whose approach is better, he is unequivocal that it is ‘my mum’. He is convinced that if he were allowed to follow such instincts and not be bound by externally imposed constraints his students would learn more, ‘get far more out of’ school and be further inspired to explore and investigate. Although neither of us mentions it at the time, it is fair to point out that Robert’s mum worked in a much more autonomous, less regulated age.

Tales 3 and 4: Amy and Miss Havisham, Arthur and Anne Boleyn

I have often used the tales of the Enigma code and the conkers with audiences as emblematic stories to demonstrate teachers’ wish to break free from the restrictions imposed on them. In response, teachers are often keen to tell me about their own moments of inspiration and success. Two of these follow, both submitted as written testimony following a session at a young teachers’ conference.

Amy is a newly qualified teacher of English in a very challenging school. Her timetable is made up of ‘mainly bottom sets, most of whom are boys’. She admits, as any of us who have been there will recognize, that her ‘Year 9 classes have (often) descended into vague chaos’ with boys ‘making comments or raising issues about things that are usually unrelated to the lesson’. Charged with teaching parts of Great Expectations, one of her pupils offers a brief literary insight into the character of Miss Havisham as ‘a psycho bitch who needs to get laid’. The comment leads to a lively exchange about women’s sexual rights, drifting into contemporary perceptions of sexual behaviour. Amy is uncertain about how to proceed. ‘I had a spilt-second thought of “oh God, do I let them run with this or do I try and pull it back?”’ She trusts herself (and her students) and a relatively orderly, sensible discussion ensues. ‘We ended up having a very exciting conversation about the issue of consent and how sex is seen in society. It definitely wasn’t anywhere near my lesson plan, but it was definitely one of those hours where I thought they had really gained a lot from what we talked about.’

In the same batch of responses comes Arthur’s tale of preparing and carrying out his session on the trial and execution of Anne Boleyn with his Year 6 class. Arthur explains that he teaches in a school in East Anglia with ‘99 point something per cent EAL’ (English as an Additional Language). The six wives of Henry VIII are not part of the cultural heritage of most of his pupils or their families. He is determined that his treatment of the topic will have an impact and so spends hours preparing the session in great detail. I leave Arthur to describe the episode:

So I got to work making an outrageous (completely historically inaccurate) costume and drinking copious amounts of tea, then using the bags to stain the torn and burnt paper I would hand out with each group’s task explained. Then drying each one on the radiator while I watched calligraphy videos on YouTube to ensure my handwriting could pass as ‘from the olden days’ while remaining accessible to the children. I rehearsed my character (in costume) in front of the mirror at length and tied each piece of paper into a neat scroll with royal red ribbons. I went to bed exhausted, but satisfied and ready to wow my class the next morning.

The lesson was a success. Children who I hadn’t reached yet shone and performed rallying speeches of why Anne Boleyn was a victim of mistaken identity. And despite how tired I was, I stayed in character, my hat only fell off twice and I re-enacted beheadings with the same enthusiasm as I had done in the mirror the night before, literally five hours earlier. The hard work had paid off. And the hard work was part of the fun and the only reason it had been a success. I did not moan about how long I had spent doing it because IT WAS WORTH IT! It was a worthwhile activity and created an engaging learning experience where all could be involved and all could achieve in some way (even if that was just to hold up a sign and boo or cheer in the right places). I could see the smiling faces and the passion in the children and feel my hard work actually working, there in front of me.

Incidentally, Arthur’s observation that he has no problem with spending time preparing lessons is echoed by many respondents. He goes on to voice an equally common complaint by teachers: he would love to put this sort of effort into preparation, even though he recognizes that this particular instance was somewhat special. The demands of his school’s accountability system make this very difficult for him to do:

Not that my school has a policy against engaging teaching. But I literally do not have the time or energy after marking to a policy that tells me if I give verbal feedback I have to write a little ‘V’ followed by everything I said, or the planning of each and every lesson in detail with reference to each Assessment Focus which relates to a level which no longer even exists.

Like much testimony gathered from teachers, Arthur’s comments frequently refer to his ‘passion’ for teaching; he epitomizes many of his colleagues’ feelings when he talks of his energy being ‘wasted on exercises that I cannot feel passionate about because, ultimately, they are 100 per cent useless’.

Tale 5: Belinda tells them to hold on to a thought

In her interview, newly qualified secondary teacher Belinda explains that, as with so many who come to the profession, it was an inspirational teacher of her own who helped her to make her career choice. I ask her if she believes that she could be that inspirational teacher and she replies that she hopes, eventually, to be so. She talks to me of the learning walk, the constant observation and of meetings dominated by graphs, numbers and grade profiles. And then she tells me about an inspirational moment.

The meticulous timing that is supposed to guide her lesson plan has gone awry (as ever) and she approaches the end of the Year 7 lesson without covering everything she should have. Much of this was down to a lively engagement with the topic. Belinda explains that she decides to take a chance with these younger pupils and tells them to take their thought, cup it safely in their hands and bring it to her next lesson. She’s not sure if they will comply, but to her delight they play along. She tells me with obvious pleasure how, over the next couple of days, she passes children in the corridor who proudly hold their cupped hands to her and how they do, indeed, bring that thought safely to her next lesson.

There is, as there has been with most of the tales thus far, a moment of bathos. She wants to share this success with colleagues at her next department meeting. ‘But meetings aren’t about that. They’re about data, levels, closing the gap, interventions.’ Nonetheless, Belinda remains undeterred and still sees teaching as providing children with ‘a doorway to improvement and opportunity’.

Tale 6. Two levels of progress or the miraculous escape of the Chilean miners?

Maurice is a primary school teacher whose responses are characterized by a growing frustration with what he sees as a narrow and restrictive approach to teaching and learning. In common with many of his colleagues, he believes that those charged with managing the process in his school have reduced learning to a series of measurable outcomes, which means that managers have to be furnished with constant proof of ‘progress’ at every turn. Maurice decides to dig his heels in.

In the autumn of 2010 the uplifting story of the escape of the Chilean miners who were trapped underground for 33 days captured the public imagination (see BBC, 2010). Maurice senses the interest in his Year 5 class and relates how he has to convince a senior manager in the school to alter a scheduled set of sessions designed to generate a required assessment exercise. His persistence pays off and he abandons the schedule to talk to the class and, eventually, get them to write about the miners. His own enthusiasm is captured in this rather breathless and occasionally muddled transcript from his interview:

What did it feel like for the relatives up there, for them to live life every single day, knowing that they may not see their sons or their daughters or their wives again? We did a piece of writing about the miners underground, how they were feeling, knowing that they may not come up alive. I did another piece of work, subsequently, when the miners came out alive, how the sons or daughter ... a few minutes after they’d found the miner, how they were feeling, using power adverbs, using everything I normally teach with, using all the punctuation, but using something they were inspired by.

In both the interviews I conduct with him, Maurice talks about the way in which the constant requirement to demonstrate ‘two levels of progress’ has become a dominant mantra at his school. He observes to me that the Chilean miners’ episode has been something of a turning-point in terms of how he now views some aspects of teaching: ‘I know pupils need to move forward. So I’ll do what I think is best to inspire them. I will teach a topic the way I want to do it, and I will be telling people what I think is best, and if Ofsted come in, I will say: this is what works for my pupils – and with confidence.’

Tale 7: Charles and Vernon change the world over a late-night drink

Charles and Vernon, secondary teachers of history and modern languages respectively, tell me about an idea hatched one night on a Year 7 trip to France. The visit has been planned to take pupils to the Bayeux tapestry and, by contrast, the D-Day landings museum at Arromanches. They both point out that their conversation about teaching, over a late night drink, is a rare opportunity to speak about education in this way, echoing earlier comments from respondents about the lack of any kind of space to do this. Vernon reports that ‘during the course of a conversation, which we would never have had the time to have during a normal teaching week, we agreed that it would be a good idea if I taught a couple of Year 12 lessons on the French and German political systems to Charles’ history classes’. Vernon agrees to introduce some aspects of language to the politics class. As the conversation develops, they agree to go ahead with the project.

The exercise is successful, receiving positive feedback from students even though this is ‘not normally something provided for in the syllabuses’. Students are entertained, and impressed that the knowledge of their subject teachers extends beyond that revealed routinely in their classes. Some start to make the connections between language, culture, politics and history, beginning an understanding that goes well beyond examination requirements. The teachers themselves revel in being challenged to take on the unfamiliar. In comments that resonate throughout these ten tales, they are not all concerned about the extra work and preparation this may entail. Vernon’s final reflection is illuminating:

I believe it added an extra dimension to their learning, which would not have happened but for a conversation between two colleagues in two different departments, which would never have happened in the normal hothouse of school.

The tale demonstrates what good teachers know: rather than have meetings between colleagues dominated by data and outcomes, there must be the opportunity to simply discuss ideas and plans – and to use the expertise, knowledge and enthusiasm of each other to develop these even more ambitiously.

Tales 8 and 9. Martin and Vera maintain the great tradition

The literary critic F.R. Leavis, author of The Great Tradition, is now considered rather unfashionable in university literature departments. All the same, his famous dictum that ‘literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness’ holds sway with a good many English teachers as well as huge numbers of the reading public (Leavis, 1948). It is, however, difficult to imagine what Leavis, or any critic from whatever tradition, might make of the way in which much literature teaching is currently approached in English schools. The fragmentation of texts and their reduction to their component parts is a common complaint from many teachers (see Rosen, 2015, for brilliantly funny comment on this).

Secondary teachers Martin and Vera refuse to play ball. Vera, a teacher with fifteen years’ experience, writes of her frustration at having to take ‘a great work of literature and reducing the teaching focus to a few pages or a couple of key scenes’. She decides to embark on ‘the now outdated and frowned upon idea’ of trying to teach the text as a whole. She readily admits that ‘tackling ‘dense and difficult language’ with a ‘not especially gifted set 1’ in Year 11 ‘did prove problematic at times’. However, after accepting the challenge, students ‘achieved on or above their target grades’ and Vera acknowledges the importance of this. For her, however, there is a greater achievement:

The thing I am most proud of is that one day, whether it be in a university lecture, on a building site or in a pub, if anyone happens to mention Macbeth or Wuthering Heights, I know that there are at least thirty-one people of a certain age who can say, ‘Oh, I’ve read that. All of it.’

Martin, too, will not settle for diluted versions of the real thing. He is charged with analysing Robert Frost’s poem, Mending Wall in which the poet challenges the lazy truism that ‘good fences make good neighbours’. Martin eschews the approach that ‘analyses’ the use of metaphors, counts the number of similes or identifies the rhyme scheme; he wants to examine the concept of the effectiveness of walls. He shows video clips of the ‘peace walls’ in Jerusalem and Belfast – the class is appalled at the former and incredulous at the existence of the latter in the UK. They look at footage of the collapse of the Berlin wall and Martin tells them how red deer, previously conditioned to avoid the electrified border with Czechoslovakia, still refuse to cross, despite the removal of the fence. Do good fences make good neighbours? The class debates the idea with vigour. Martin has struck teaching gold and, what is more, the students understand what the poem is about. By way of contrast with Belinda, who was unable to share her ‘cupped hands’ idea, Martin is able to talk to colleagues, who happily borrow from these original ideas. Nonetheless, his school’s expectations are such that even as the conversation in class flows, he is obliged to truncate it so that pupils write something in their books ‘to show’ as he wryly observes, ‘that we’ve done some work’.

Tale 10. Abigail lets the hosepipe loose

I leave the final story to Abigail. Recently retired as a primary teacher, her written testimony identifies all of the detrimental features of the GERM and its effect on colleagues and children. She remains, however, unrelentingly optimistic, saying of many young teachers that ‘in spite of the bland, prescriptive diet of schemes and plans they were expected to follow, they still worked hard to inspire their pupils’.

In contextualizing a compelling anecdote, she explains that she spends some considerable time happily setting up a session in the school garden and invites a colleague – Mrs B – to join her. The latter, however, is not convinced of the value of the exercise, leaving Abigail a little disappointed and frustrated. Abigail’s written response speaks for itself:

Anyway, to get back to that hot June afternoon. I went to Mrs B’s classroom to collect an EAL (children for whom English is an additional language) group I was supporting that afternoon and suggested we take all the children out to work on the garden, and she said she was far too busy in the classroom and would join us later. I gathered up my little group of multilingual gardeners and we left the rest to do the ‘real learning’ in the hot stuffy classroom. We spent a long time tending to our plot of vegetables and herbs, writing labels, looking for changes, enjoying the textures and smells, discovering insects and all the other experiences you would expect and then decided our plants needed a drink so out came the hose pipe. We gave the beds a good watering and by this time Mrs B had joined us with the rest of the class. When one of my newly arrived Polish boys saw her, he called out ‘Mrs B it wet’. Naturally I took this to mean he wanted me to point the hosepipe at Mrs B and soak her to the skin. She had particularly annoyed me that afternoon so I did just that. The noise and hysteria that followed generated a large audience of pupils and staff including the Head and Deputy. Mrs B, the teaching assistant (TA), 30 small people and myself were completely drenched. Fortunately Mrs B and her TA saw the funny side and of course the children loved it. The hosepipe moment had not been in my lesson plan, I had not done a risk assessment and several nearby lessons had been disturbed but somehow I was forgiven. As for my little Polish boy, the next day he drew a beautiful detailed picture of the garden and wrote his first ever sentence in English: ‘I wet in gdn.’ I was very proud and so was his mum.

Abigail concludes her written commentary with a personal note to me, which could also serve as an accurate epigram for this book. She writes, ‘I think what I’m trying to say is that many teachers have their hosepipe moments and many dare to open cans of worms (a reference to an earlier part of her testimony) when the time seems right. God bless ’em all.’

These ten uplifting tales are just a selection from a whole range of possible stories. In the course of interviewing teachers and eliciting written testimony from them, I found their great enthusiasm for sharing such moments to be the most gratifying and enjoyable feature of the research. Teachers wanted to share such moments because they mean something to them and their students. The view that this is what they came into teaching for is expressed in various ways when such tales are told. I hope the teachers reading them will recognize much of their own practice, and that others – be they parents, students or teacher educators – recall such moments from their own school experience.

It is also important to understand that in following their instincts in this way, teachers, knowingly or not, are acknowledging what classic educational theorists and commentators have been writing about for decades. The removal of pedagogical studies from the training of most teachers, much less any consideration of notions such as child psychology or development, has often been a hindrance to teachers being genuinely reflective about their practice in an informed way. Yet the most cursory of whistle-stop tours through the work of writers on pedagogy would convince these beheaders of Anne Boleyn and cuppers of ideas that they are, indeed, really doing the right thing.

Jerome Bruner, writing in 1960, pointed to the fact that ‘interest in the material to be learned is the best stimulus to learning, rather than such external goals as grades or later competitive advantage’ (Bruner, 1960: 14). Bruner went on to observe that ‘motives for learning must be kept from going passive ... they must be based as much as possible upon the arousal of interest in what there is to be learned’ (80). In his classic work from over fifty years ago about how children in the education system learn, or sometimes fail to learn, John Holt writes that:

The human mind ... is a mystery and, in large part, will probably always be so. It takes even the most thoughtful, honest and introspective person many years to learn even a small part of what goes on in his own mind. How, then, can we be sure about what goes on in the mind of another? Yet many people talk as if we could measure and list the contents of another person’s mind as easily, accurately and fully as the contents of a suitcase.

(Holt, 1991: xv)

When Vygotsky expresses the idea that ‘human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 88), he is pointing to the fact that the process of learning cannot be what Freire (1990) describes as an act of ‘depositing’ knowledge, in a way that ignores humanity and human behaviour. Teachers know this well, whether or not they are aware of the work of such theorists.

Holly, a teacher of physical education in a secondary school, tells me a story about depositing that makes this former teacher of English smile. She was attending a meeting of heads of department in her school where the leadership team of the school plans for ways in which they can improve the scores in its overall results’ profile. In a peculiar parlour game, certain subjects are assigned values and are allocated to particular ‘buckets’. I check that I have heard her correctly. Yes, buckets. Her PE bucket is low value. English, Mathematics and Science are high value. A conversation ensues in the meeting about ways to ensure how the high value buckets are to be filled. I have a final check to make certain she is not pulling my leg.

I hope that I have never been, and never become, one of those grumpy old teachers who harrumphs about the perceived ignorance of younger generations. Not everyone will be familiar with the works of Irish poet W.B.Yeats or the novels of Dickens. Holly’s senior team clearly was not. Yeats wrote that ‘education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire’. In his picture of the Victorian schoolroom at the start of Hard Times, Dickens has Thomas Gradgrind – ‘what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life’ – survey the class to see ‘little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim’. Whether or not Holly’s colleagues had read Dickens, Bruner or Vygotsky, their practice is as perfect an illustration of ‘depositing’ as we could have. Fortunately, as testimony in this chapter demonstrates, teachers still prefer fire-lighting to bucket-filling.

One final idea needs to be addressed here. The stories and episodes referred to above confirm, as the title of this book suggests, that the spirit of teachers has not been crushed. Every parent, child and member of the public should be encouraged by this: inspiring, creative teachers are what we all want. There is, however, one constituency within the profession that sometimes needs reminding of the energy and inventiveness that still characterizes the actions of many teachers – and that is their more experienced colleagues.

From my conversations with them it appears that a significant number of older teachers – by no means all – subscribe to the idea that the self-disciplining of the profession through the accountability agenda is now immovably entrenched. This is captured in the observation of one such experienced respondent in the original set of interviews conducted in 2012. Shaun, highly experienced, identifies what he sees as a generation of teachers who are happy to use pre-planned resources and to ‘teach to that’ and ‘want to be told what to do’. In December 2011, I decided to put this to the test.

I contacted 13 teachers with whom I was professionally acquainted, each of whom had a minimum of fifteen years’ experience. I explained that the purpose of my approach was to test my perception that experienced colleagues often held the view that few new entrants to the profession were willing to challenge the status quo. Respondents were asked to indicate their response to the notion that in the last five to ten years, teachers new to the profession were prepared to challenge what I then called ‘the accountability agenda’. Within days of the start of the Christmas break I had received responses from twelve of them. All bar one indicated that they felt that new entrants had bought into the current agenda and this differing response was qualified by a note explaining that any challenge would only happen ‘if they were any good’. In the view of this small and somewhat random cohort, who had been captured in something of a snapshot, it became clear that the perception of acquiescence was strong.

The lengthy written testimony, provided voluntarily by many of this particular cohort, was especially illuminating. One respondent observed: ‘it’s a good question, because I could go on about this at length – and on the second day of my holiday too!’ The comments themselves are heartfelt and passionate. One teacher despairs of the ‘Orwellian trance of compliance’ she observes around her, while another bemoans the ‘general gobbledegook of pseudo-management speak that has permeated our profession’ and sees ‘very little challenge to it from the new generation’. Such sentiments are common. They are summarized by a primary school headteacher of some twenty years who observes that ‘it is all they have known so they don’t imagine it can be different’.

I mention this research to reinforce a couple of ideas referred to earlier. In a working life where team meetings are limited to progress checks and data trawls, there is little space for teachers to actually communicate thoughts and ideas about their beliefs, actions and even their abilities. And in a working environment that has closed down the metaphorical and literal spaces for such discussion – the loss of staffrooms, lunch-hours spent in frenetic activity – the opportunity for informal, professional conversation is lost. In the whirligig of activity which is often confused with ‘ensuring progress’ or ‘raising standards’ the outmoded idea of genuine professional dialogue falls by the wayside and we end up in a position where even those with an apparently common interest fail to see and appreciate each other’s abilities. When applied to the labour process the term ‘alienation’ is laden with a variety of interpretations and analyses, but common to any such understanding of the term is the way in which prevalent material conditions can affect social relationships. One of the effects of the marketization of education is the diminution of collective conversation, and the easy exchange of ideas that could and should work to the benefit of students and teachers alike. Those who suspect that newer entrants to the profession have empty spirits would do well to find the time to test that proposition more closely.

In describing the features of the GERM, Sahlberg identifies principal contributors to the infection as: low-risk ways to reach learning goals, a focus on core subjects and a standardization of education. In the selected anecdotes that form the basis of this chapter, all three of these elements are present – and all three are, to some extent, resisted by teachers. The chapter that follows looks at the way in which some of those charged with leading schools are also in sympathy with the fire-lighters that Yeats wanted educators to be.